PhoneMarketingInsider » Advertising Techniques

How to Create a Great First Impression on your Advertising Website

Rocky — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:00:09 +0000

It’s only natural. When choosing an interior designer, I look at how the designer dresses. When choosing a web graphic artist, I check out their website. One could clearly develop a case of all the interior designers who create fantastic designs, but don’t dress well themselves, or the web graphic artists who decided not to invest in a fancy website, but draw the most creative logos. That’s not the point. The point is that since most people do work under these impressions and stereotypes, businesses must be aware of their appearance. DDB, a leading advertising agency, understands this concept to the tee.

Businesses that are seeking an advertising agency use the agency’s website to gauge their creativity. DDB’s excellent site illustrates this point throughout their website. I’d like to highlight 3 lessons that we can learn from DDB:

“Show, don’t tell” – DDB’s largest graphic on their home page follows this lesson that my ninth grade English teacher loved to repeat. Their video describes the evolution of “The Fun Theory,” initiated by Volkswagen as a test of whether people will opt to an environmentally advantageous alternative if it is more “fun.” The video “Piano Stairs” went viral, with over 12 million viewers to date, and if you’ve watched the video you understand why. By showing website visitors one clear example of how DDB completely transformed Volkswagon’s image, DDB gets businesses to think “how could DDB transform my brand?”
Engage Your Visitors- The home page also contains a play button link next to the phrase “I feel creative” that produces a pop up screen with DDB ads that visitors can rate. The goal of this activity is to encourage visitors to participate in the site and watch their work in an interactive way. For advertising agencies that have used phone voting polls, such as Ifbyphone’s VoteByPhone, a website poll could also be conducted with phone technology so that visitors participate in the same type of poll that they would use in their own advertising.
Create active links- On DDB’s contact page, every piece of information contains an active link. Clicking on the phone number directly calls the contact via Skype. Clicking on the email directly loads a new message to compose. Clicking on the twitter accounts brings you directly to DDB’s twitter account. These quick links give off a great first impression that DDB follows through on all of the little details. Perhaps even more importantly, by making the contact process so simple, they prevent potential clients from filing the phone call or email to DDB under their list of things to do (a habit that’s all too familiar to many of us). Instead, they invite website visitors to continue their contact with DDB right away.

Check out the DDB website, and other advertising agency websites. What other methods can advertising agencies employ of their websites to create a striking first impression?

Lance Armstrong Denies Doping: 3 Ways Phones Can Monitor Ad Campaign Damage

Rocky — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:29:21 +0000

Between the Tour of California, Radio Shack’s Live for Livestrong campaign and Lance Armstrong’s crash, he’s been all over the news. Between the personal question of whether Floyd Landis’ allegations against Armstrong will prevail or whether Armstrong will once again come clear, advertisers must worry about their own concerns. An entire array of advertising and marketing campaigns were built on Armstrong’s ability to survive cancer and win the Tour de France 7 times. How should Radio Shack monitor its first television commercial, “The Shack and Lance Power the Mobile Universe,” or its very moving “Ride for Livestrong” campaign, in light of the allegations? Armstrong released a press statement, but what tools can advertisers use to keep tabs on their customers?

This obviously isn’t the first time that advertisers built their entire content around one figure, one message or one target that became threatened. In this situation, the case is particularly delicate, because the story is still surfacing, and the allegations may be completely false.

Leaving aside the particulars of this case, let’s talk about 3 ways that advertisers can use phones to monitor ad campaigns.

1) Ad Tracking- By placing dynamic numbers on specific ads, you can obtain highly precise analytics about which conversions originated in a specific advertisement, whether online, on TV, on a mobile app, etc. In this way, you will know which customers were originally drawn to your offering through this advertisement.

2) Voice Broadcasts- Reach out to your customers and stay in touch. Your voice broadcast can relate to a specific complex situation that you are currently facing, or it can just give customers a way to contact you. Either way, voice broadcasts are a great tool to stay in touch, and enable customers to route their call to any relevant departments.

3) Surveys- Ask your customers what they are thinking. Sending out a customer service survey via an automated phone system takes little time to set up and is an inexpensive way to obtain customer feedback.

Google “Whisper Ads” Video: Would You Put Up with Targeted Ads? [POLL]

Rocky — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:36:43 +0000

My first reaction to The Onion’s latest video, “The New Targeted Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads into Users’ Ears,” was similar to Engadget’s “Oh man, the Onion really outdid itself this time.” What makes the video so amusing is that at the beginning it seems incredibly real and then it ventures on to the absolute extreme, with a whisper ad in the middle of an emergency call. But then I took a step back and asked myself, what if Google really did figure out a way to incorporate targeted whisper ads into our phone calls in order to offer a completely free smartphone. Would I, just maybe, be willing to put up with the ads in order to credit my monthly cell phone bills? What makes voice based ads during a telephone call so much worse than the pop up ads that surface in the middle of browsing the Internet or using a mobile app? What if Google limited the ads to once every 3-5 minutes (and obviously blocked ads from emergency calls…)?

Just to make the Onion video a little more fun, call into VoteByPhone and share your opinion. Is the concept of “whisper ads” too extreme to ever entertain, or could you envision a situation where this concept could actually serve as a beneficial model?

CALL OUR TOLL FREE NUMBER TO VOTE BY PHONE (877) 663 – 4605. (powered by PMI’s Ifbyphone account)

Voting poll will be open from now until midnight on Monday May 24th. Click here to view the results in realtime.

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears

On PMI we’ve talked mostly about the positive side of targeted mobile ads, from both the perspectives of customers and advertising agencies. Check out some of our posts on targeted ads, such as Is Apple Joining the Ad Business?, Find the Location of Any Phone Number with Cloudvox, Location on Facebook: Good NEws for SMBs, Mobile Marketing is Also on the Customer’s Side, Why Ad Agencies Should Choose Telephones Over Interactive Displays. This video, by Onion, emphasizes the possible intrusions of targeted ads, taken to the extreme. Where do you stand?

Location on Facebook, Good News for SMBs

Rocky — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:57:22 +0000

The idea “location, location, location”… really hit my mind after yesterday’s announcement of Cloudvox’s new web app to find the location of any phone number. I started thinking about how new technologies and marketing plans are going back to the basic realization that people’s lives still revolve around the location in which they live. The trend towards location in advertising, marketing and sales could signify good news for SMBs (especially located based businesses), in their constant struggle to compete with larger national and international corporates. Let’s take a look at some of the trends towards location on Facebook, Twitter and others to see how small businesses, advertisers and developers can leverage these opportunities.

Here’s Gigaom’s post on today’s anticipated news at Facebook’s f8 developer’s conference, for example:

Finally, it is widely expected that Facebook is going to announce some kind of location capability at f8. By adding place tagging, in one fell swoop, they could gain the largest single userbase for updates tagged with location. The check-in behavior popularized by the likes of FourSquare would become more easily usable for its more mainstream audience. This was the approach Twitter announced at its own developer conference last week.

But as users start adding location context to Facebook data, there will be more opportunities to make use of social actions married to geo-location. Aggregating people around location will make it much easier for people to socialize and interact offline. It also opens up the opportunity to go after the lucrative local market, another place to compete directly with Google. Facebook could soon have pages for every local restaurant and hair salon, accompanied by user likes, shares and comments and enabling offline businesses to have closer ties with their users. That would give Yelp a run for their money, too.

SocialBeat adds some more insight to the upcoming Facebook location features, in the form of risks and opportunities:

Opportunities: Smart location features open the door to socially-intelligent local ads and lead generation – a multibillion dollar opportunity. No company, Google and Yelp included, has solved this. Facebook has positioned itself as a brand advertising solution, in contrast to Google with its comparative strength in search ads near the point of purchase. The problem is brand advertising doesn’t yet have the analytics behind it to quantify effectiveness. Mobile advertising and analytics represent one powerful and accountable solution to this. Location-sharing could be used to track follow-through and whether users actually visited a restaurant or store after seeing a campaign.

Risks: Again, a privacy backlash. Just because a user has 1,000 friends doesn’t mean they want to blast their location out to them.

Which brings us back to Gigaom’s post about Twitter’s launch of Places:

Twitter’s new location feature, Places, will give developers a structured and curated database of places from around the world. That will allow tweets to be associated with the actual location they originated from, in a way that’s more decipherable and interesting than lat-long coordinates.

With all of this speculative info in mind, the question is: how can SMBs, and location-based businesses use the trend towards location, targeted mobile advertising, and local ads to their advantage? Gigaom anticipates that Facebook will figure out how to use the concept of location to monetize their large customer base, Twitter is doing the same, Foursquare is becoming a big location based player, and we recently wrote about how Apple is targeting location based mobile ads. Advertisers will begin finding ways to more directly target their specific market. Implementing Cloudvox’s new web app to direct callers to the right branch or retail chain, based on location is one idea, which we discussed yesterday. What other ideas would you suggest?

Is Apple Joining the Ad Business?

Rocky — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:00:41 +0000

Is Apple getting into the ad business? On Friday, Apple unveiled to Online Media Daily their plan to launch a new mobile ad platform together with the ipad release.

Here’s a snippet of how Wired sees the future of Apple’s targeted mobile ads:

So, why is Apple getting into advertising, assuming this report is accurate? Well, why not?

Mobile devices, with their extensive knowledge of where you are and what you’re doing, hold great potential for advertisers, ever-eager to put their wares in front of a specific slice of the general population.

Do you suspect that women aged 18 to 30 who are sitting in hair salons on sunny Saturday afternoons would be particularly likely to appreciate your company’s moisturizer? Mobile ads are capable of targeting them in ways that print magazines were not, and can even slice demographics with more precision than websites, which generally don’t know that people are sitting in hair salons.

With the general rise in targeted personalized ads, Apple’s intentions are no surprise. The NAI’s (National Advertising Initiative) recent study found behaviorally targeted ads more than twice as valuable and twice as effective as non-targeted online ads. If the future is going to show movement towards behavioral targeting, then the mobile platform matches that trend with its ability to reach consumers in their most natural settings.

Super Bowl Advertising is Not Just About Buzz

Rocky — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:36:28 +0000

I have to admit that even before my marketing career, I fell into the category of Super Bowl watchers that are more interested in the entertaining commercials than in the game itself. While die hard football fans may use the commercials as an opportunity to get something to eat or drink, I take my breaks during the game itself.

Apparently, I’m not alone. ABS CBN News reported, in the name of John Mossawir, research director for Initiative Sports Futures, that ”four in five people say the commercials can sometimes be more entertaining than the game. About one in four say they go online to view commercials they’ve already seen, and about 70 percent say they talk about the ads during the game.”

That being said, the entertainment factor of the exciting ads does not always trickle down to more sales conversions.

A great PRNewswire press release from Feb 5th, by TeamDetroit, called “The Evolution of Superbowl Advertising” comments on the trend towards producing the most outrageous advertisements “isn’t always the brightest strategy.” Creating outrageous commercials may generate a big buzz, but that doesn’t mean that they will generate more sales leads.

Instead, as with all marketing strategies, businesses need to be able to follow up their advertisements with their future marketing and social media, brand image and product offering. Consider the following quote from the press release:

“You can’t run a lot of hard-hitting, information-based persuasion ads all year and then on Super Bowl Sunday try to entertain your audience with fun and emotionally engaging advertising. It’s like opening a restaurant and serving bland, healthy food 364 days a year and one day of the year serving food that tastes great and excites you.” …

Great Super Bowl advertising, says Bentley, is not about moving consumers from un-persuaded to persuaded in 30 seconds.

“It’s about creating a halo of influence around that brand and establishing an ongoing dialogue with consumers that extends to the web and social media and the mobile phone and online gaming.”

Which is why so many Super Bowl commercials are now what Bentley refers to as subservient ads,

“where the purpose is to get you to do something else, typically on the web, where you can be more entertaining and emotionally engaging and you don’t have to necessarily conform to some of the social niceties that you do on TV.”

Perhaps this is why companies like Pepsi decided to use social media this year, instead of a 30 second Super Bowl commercial. The message that marketing needs to reach beyond buzz shows its extreme expression in Super Bowl advertisements, but its relevance applies to marketing year-round. Advertisements cannot capture customers and produce real results in split seconds. Real marketing requires real follow up. When companies do create a big buzz, they should also implement methods of lead tracking. Using analytics reports to track which advertisements generated sales conversions is key to connecting the buzz to the bottom line.

Google Launches TV Ad Tracking Using Toll Free Numbers

Rocky — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:01:39 +0000

Google’s new release, announced yesterday, enables advertisers through Google’s TV ads for television campaigns to use Google’s toll free numbers to track phone leads back to the TV campaign.

This new release captures the same appeal as Ifbyphone’s Call Tracking video in yesterday’s post. The lesson for advertisers is simple – if you are investing in ads, whether in print, online, on the radio or on TV, you want to be able to assess the leads generated by your ads, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The Google TV Ads Blog summarizes the new feature as follows:

The system tracks incoming calls and matches each call down to the network, daypart and even program level. Advertisers will find these metrics in their campaign ‘Targets’ tab which reports data like “Live Inquiries,” “Drag Inquiries” (calls that come in a significant time after an ad has aired) and cost-per-inquiry. Our system takes into account the number of impressions, network, and time of day for each ad to help match calls as accurately as possible. In addition, the algorithm has been designed to predict call response with increasing accuracy as it learns from your data over time.

Call tracking needs two components in order to help you maximize the success of your advertising campaigns. The first component, available through Ifbyphone, Google and others, is the toll free numbers. By associating dynamic numbers with different advertising campaigns, the system can track phone leads back to their campaign origin. The logic behind this method reflects the notion that the number of ad viewers is not as significant as the number of phone calls (or active clients) that the ad produces. The second component involves the analytics reports. Easy to use and information rich analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, or Ifbyphone’s real time call analytics reports, provide your business with the tools to analyze the success of previous campaigns and to integrate this information into future advertising decisions.

Check out webpronews’s post on this new feature.